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Ellison Puts His Money Where His Forehand Is

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — The most powerful man in the stadium sits in the front row, behind the north baseline, wearing a baseball cap and fist-pumping for his favorite players.

He is Larry Ellison, the tanned chief executive of Oracle, who in 2010 purchased the BNP Paribas Open, a combined ATP Masters 1,000 and WTA premier mandatory event largely considered the lead contender for the colloquial title of the Fifth Slam. Ellison, whose purchase of the tournament allowed it to stay here, is considered something of a savior for the event.

With an estimated net worth of $36 billion, Ellison is listed by Forbes as the third-richest person in the United States (behind Bill Gates and Warren Buffet) and the sixth wealthiest worldwide.

With the unique access his status affords, Ellison, an ardent tennis fan and player, stepped onto the court during the tournament with the 10-time Grand Slam champion and current No. 2, Rafael Nadal, whom Ellison casually mentioned was “staying at my place.”

“I hit with him for an hour and a half the other day, which was quite an experience,” Ellison, 67, said before gushing about Nadal’s incomparable topspin. “The ball, when it hits the ground, people think it just kicks up high to Roger’s backhand. That’s kind of not the problem. The problem is it kicks away from you sometimes, kicks towards you sometimes. It’s really a difficult shot. He puts just massive amounts of spin, and he can also obviously go very big.”

Although he spends much of his time at the tournament watching Roger Federer, whom he calls “the greatest tennis player that ever lived,” and Nadal, “the best athlete to ever play tennis,” Ellison is conversant on a long roster of players, up and down the rankings.

“David Nalbandian, such a clean striker of the ball.”

“Ana Ivanovic is playing great.”

Though he takes the time to admire the skills of lower-ranked players — like the forehand of the 129th-ranked Marinko Matosevic of Australia, “almost no backswing”— competitors who do not do well at the tournament get a fairly small cut of the purse.

Ellison, who according to The Wall Street Journal was the highest-compensated executive of the previous decade, significantly increased the prize money for the champions of the tournament, which has 96-player singles draws. The men’s and women’s singles champions will receive $1 million in 2012. For the men’s champion, that is nearly a $400,000 increase over 2011 and it is a $300,000 boost for the women. The pay increases for players losing in the early rounds were comparatively minimal, with the bump for first-round losers amounting to less than $1,000.

“I think it’s symbolic, in that we’re trying to be the best Masters 1,000,” Ellison said of the increase.

The compensation may not be even, but the emphasis on technology at Ellison’s event is unmatched at any other tournament.

All eight courts used for the BNP Paribas Open are equipped with the Hawk-Eye system that is used by players to challenge calls, making it the only tournament to have the apparatus on every court. Wimbledon and the United States Open each have the technology available on four courts, while the Australian Open has it on three.

The relative scarcity of Hawk-Eye caused confusion during a mixed doubles match at the Australian Open in January. The partners Max Mirnyi of Belarus and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova of Russia tried to challenge a shot they believed was out, only to be told by the chair umpire that no Hawk-Eye system had been installed on Show Court 2, Melbourne Park’s fourth-biggest stadium, which seats some 3,000 spectators.

“I just felt that being on a show court, I felt like there were a lot of people, not only me, many want to have evidence of where the ball landed,” Mirnyi said after the match, citing the increased presence of Hawk-Eye at Indian Wells as a reason he assumed Show Court 2 would be equipped with it as well. “So, unfortunately we didn’t have Hawk-Eye, but I felt there were a lot of questionable calls.”

The opposite, incorrect assumption seemed to happen at the outer courts of the BNP Paribas Open, where players occasionally appear to forget that the system is available. For instance, tiny Court 5, which seats a maximum of 900 spectators, rarely sees half that number of fans because of the guaranteed obscurity of the players assigned to the court.

“You can imagine how frustrating it would be to think you lost the match, or the match turned on a bad call,” Ellison said. “So I think the players really like playing here for a lot of reasons, and that’s one of the reasons — that it’s going to be a fairly judged match because Hawk-Eye is everywhere.”

Ellison cites kaizen, the Japanese word used to represent the concept of continuous improvement, as his mind-set when it comes to managing the tournament.

“I think you always see little things where you can make improvements, and I think that’s just having an eye for that,” he said. “And you know, the other thing is talking with players. What do they like? What can we do to make it easier for them?”

“The tournament makes money, and we take that money and put it back in the form of investments. Buying additional land for parking, putting in Hawk-Eye, upping the prize money — doing all those things just trying to make our tournament better.”

But while his enthusiasm for tennis nears obsession, Ellison is ready to apply his philosophies to other professional sports.

“If it makes sense, I’m going to buy a basketball team,” Ellison said. “But I think there are a bunch of things you can do to make basketball better, in terms of a better experience for the fans.”

“I think a lot of the stadiums really aren’t very good,” Ellison added, citing Bankers Life Fieldhouse, home of the Indiana Pacers as an arena he does like.

“A lot of the stadiums make no sense to me,” he said. “You’re sitting so far away from the game.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 18, 2012, on page SP4 of the New York edition with the headline: Ellison Puts His Money Where His Forehand Is. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe